The Use of Computational Fluid Dynamics for Assessing Flow-Induced Acoustics to Diagnose Lung Conditions

Abstract

Pulmonary diseases are a leading cause of illness and disability globally. While having access to hospitals or specialist clinics for investigations is currently the usual way to characterize the patient’s condition, access to medical services is restricted in less resourced settings. We posit that pulmonary disease may impact on vocalization which could aid in characterizing a pulmonary condition. We therefore propose a new method to diagnose pulmonary disease analyzing the vocal and cough changes of a patient. Computational fluid dynamics holds immense potential for assessing the flow-induced acoustics in the lungs. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of flow-induced vocal-, cough-, and lung-generated acoustics to diagnose lung conditions using computational fluid dynamics methods. In this study, pneumonia is the model disease which is studied. The hypothesis is that using a computational fluid dynamics model for assessing the flow-induced acoustics will accurately represent the flow-induced acoustics for healthy and infected lungs and that possible modeled difference in fluid and acoustic behavior between these pathologies will be tested and described. Computational fluid dynamics and a lung geometry will be used to simulate the flow distribution and obtain the acoustics for the different scenarios. The results suggest that it is possible to determine the difference in vocalization between healthy lungs and those with pneumonia, using computational fluid dynamics, as the flow patterns and acoustics differ. Our results suggest there is potential for computational fluid dynamics to enhance understanding of flow-induced acoustics that could be characteristic of different lung pathologies. Such simulations could be repeated using machine learning with the final objective to use telemedicine to triage or diagnose patients with respiratory illness remotely.